Reviews by MathBrush

This was one of the better experiences I’ve had with a custom parser game written for a retro format.

This game was written for the Commodore 64 platform and must be played in an emulator. I played with the Vice emulator.

It is a murder mystery. It comes with a great deal of background material. There are feelies with long, in-depth interviews with each of the suspects. There are also guides on what can be typed. I found it necessary to read every single feelie and command guide and manual to complete the game, as there are essential components you will likely not find without help (such as the important ANALYZE command).

The setting and game style is intentionally reminiscent of old Infocom mysteries such as Deadline and Suspect. There is a single house with multiple independent NPCs moving about and various clues.

I’ll talk a bit about things that were frustrating and things that worked well.

Frustrations came mostly from the engine and parser. The Commodore 64 emulator I had imitated its old clunkiness. Each room takes several seconds to load. If you go the wrong way and want to turn around, it’s 20 seconds just to correct your mistake. There was a ‘speed up’ button which I used, however, it caused the space bar to wig out, making only one-word commands possible in fast mode (great for navigation). At one point while messing with speed and trying to type ‘E’ I made the emulator hang up; I don’t believe it was the game’s fault.

Some commands were a bit difficult to phrase. One must type ‘interior garage door’; ‘interior door’ will not suffice. TALK TO someone and OPEN something almost always returned a blank line with no response at all.

The story and motives were lavishly described but stretched the imagination a bit. I’m not sure the motive found in the game would hold up in court, and some of the puzzles felt a bit arbitrary.

Those are the frustrating points. The good points are that outside of the above-mentioned difficulties, the parser was quite robust. I was frequently able to do what I wanted in an easy fashion. Puzzles were well-clued; I only turned to the walkthrough to speed up after I had the game crash. I do recommend playing on your own first without the walkthrough as it can help explain some of the more unusual action choices. I do think I would have had to turn to a walkthrough no matter what, though.

Other good things are the reasonable scope of the entry. With the slow emulation and the minimal parser, a long game could have stretched patience thin. This game seems well designed and compact, and is more fair (in my opinion) than the original infocom games. All interactable items are listed at the end of the paragraph, so you don’t have to worry about whether scenery contains an important clue.

In the past, I’ve had many bad experiences with custom parser and retro platforms. I’d say that this was genuinely refreshing and was, compared to those experiences, satisfying. For someone unaccustomed to such platforms I could imagine there would be much frustration. I also found the feelies to be very high quality (although there is a ‘images go here’ section that I believe will eventually be corrected). If I could change one thing, it’d be allowing ‘X’ as look at. I appreciate the game and was glad to play it!

This is a brief Texture game, one where you drag actions over verbs. It looks like several of the Texture games in this comp were written by authors who supported each other, as they retweet each other on twitter, use similar verbs in their games (like THINK and INSPECT) and one mentioned a writing circle. If it’s true, then that’s cool, because having people to bounce ideas off of can make for much stronger games.

This is a compelling game about someone receiving a text about a sister who died. You must go to your sister’s apartment and inspect her things, deciding what to do with them.

While they are unrelated, I kind of saw this as a counterpoint to My Brother, the Parasite. That was a dark and unpleasant game about a brother who was very close to the protagonist but also very violent. This is a bittersweet game about a sister who is distant from the protagonist yet left behind a lot of sweet memories. While you can’t see everything on one playthrough, I most enjoyed the moments about the big red jacket, as it was a striking visual and a sweet way to remember someone.

This is a pretty tricky ink game. I had to play it around 10 to 13 times to win, even using saves. I didn’t realize that one of the keys to winning was (Spoiler - click to show)steadying your nerves with a cigarette. At least I think that’s what happened. But it would make sense, since it’s in the cover art.

This a hardboiled NYC cop thriller, kind of like NYPD Blue (although I don’t remember much of that show as I wasn’t allowed to watch it. One of the first network shows with nudity!). You are a hostage negotiator at a bank robbery and have to find the best strategy for capturing the thieves and freeing the hostages.

After many, many attempts, I was able to free all the hostages, although the criminals went free.

On the one hand, I felt like it was too hard to strategize in this game, as there weren’t many clues as to what path is best. On the other hand, it was short enough that I could try multiple things on multiple attempts.

This is a parser puzzle game made in 4 hours or less for Ectocomp.

In it, you play as someone who has been bound and thrown in the basement of a church, a sacrifice for a cult. You have to escape and find your way out of town.

Like most parser games made in 4 hours, it has some rough spots, some missing implementation. But I found many of the puzzles intuitive; I thought, 'hmm, I wonder if I could use that for...' only to have it work.

The writing was evocative and descriptive. There was an isolated example of strong profanity which didn't fit, I think, with the intelligent, brooding and contemplative hero.

Overall, a good effort for Petite Mort, and something I enjoyed playing, although it would benefit from more polishing if there was a post-comp release.

This is an altgame, like Depression Quest or Will Not Let Me Go, a game that seeks to bring understanding to a mental illness or other aspects of life that need awareness.

In this case, the topic at hand is social anxiety. You sign up for a haunted house tour that can result in cash prizes. Along the way, though, you encounter several social situations that cause you extreme anxiety.

The situations do seem well-designed to cause a lot of anxiety. I don't have social anxiety, but two of my close relatives do, and this really reminded me of them.

The game is fairly short, though, and I didn't get a feel that the ending was strongly connected to the rest of the game; it felt abrupt, perhaps due to the 6 hour time frame for the game? In and of itself, I thought the ending was effective, though.

Other than that, I found the game well-written, thoughtul, and interesting.

This game was pretty difficult but rewarding. It was entered in the La Petite Morte part of Ectocomp, which is surprising given its complexity.

In it, you have a large rectangular grid of a dungeon, and you have to make a map for adventurers to wander in. You have to destroy adventurers, but to reach the weapons you need to hit them, you have to make a path that adventurers can also take, and if they get the weapons, they win.

I was baffled at first, and had no clue what I was doing. I found that the adventurers follow close behind you and can kill you the instant they have line of sight. I also found that you can't throw the killing weapon unless you have line of sight.

So I was truly baffled until I read the hints on the Psionic weapon, and then things became a lot more clear.

Overall, this was pretty fun. My only sticking point was how hard it was to get started, but after that I liked the puzzle.

This is a relatively brief visual novel written for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol competition.

It's a tale about a creature from Hell (a tiefling maybe?) and a paladin who dispute over an apprentice called Strider who apparently was captured by a shapeshifter (or replaced?), although this is never mentioned again.

I've struggled to review it, so I'll use my arbitrary 5-star criteria:

+Polish: The game has no bugs that I can see and looks visually well-put-together.

+Descriptiveness: There is some vivid imagery around things like snakes and eyes.

-Interactivity: You have choices, but it's not clear what effects they have, and the narrative lurches from scene to scene with little connection. I'm all for disjointed or dream like narrative, but I feel like there was no connecting thread binding this together.

-Emotional impact: Because of the 'jumpiness' of the story, it was hard to get invested. They are at a bar...then there is a fight...once the fight is done an abbess enters the same room to condemn a character...but maybe this room is in hell?

-Would I play again? Not at this time. I've played at least one other game by this author in Gruescript, which was interesting, and I would play more in the future, but this one kind of went over my head.

This game has me at a bit of a loss. I'm a big fan of Andrew Schultz and probably have had more total fun playing all his games than almost all authors over the last decade.

But this one just doesn't do it for me. It has an amusing start (reminding me of Five Nights at Freddies), but then it got bogged down.

It uses rhyming pairs; each room name has two words in it, and you must find things that rhyme with those two words and which also are alliterative.

There were two problems for me. The first is that progress seemed to require hitting all of the rhyming pairs the author thought of (at least, some enemies weren't counted as 'defeated' until you had done so), and second, the game didn't recognize a very large number of rhyming pairs that would logically work. This is almost certainly due to the short timeframe of the game (4 hours), so as a speed IF this game is actually quite remarkable, but as a game in general I found it less successful.

The second thing is bugs; the downloaded and online versions acted differently, with the downloaded version not accepting the command that gives access to the east and west areas. The online version didn't accept one command in the walkthrough, and the final area could be accessed directly from the beginning of the game if guessed correctly.

Outside of those issues, the game is pretty great; I love the idea of having a showdown with multiple mech monstrosities. Literally the one thing that could take this from a (for me) two star game to a 4 or 5 star game is more polish, but, alas, that is exactly what this specific competition proscribes.

This glulx game was entered in Ectocomp.

In it, you play a classic noir-style detective (who has, I believe, appeared in other games by the same author, as Castronegro was mentioned) who has been commissioned to investigate a haunted house.

The bulk of the game consists of investigating, first at places like libraries and courthouses and then at the house itself, which has more action pieces.

The writing is elaborate, fully leaning in to both noir style and early cosmic horror style. For instance:
'The house, wrapped in an aura of faded elegance, evokes a
bygone era through its windows and timeworn architecture. As the
wind stirs the leaves, a sense of mystery lingers, hinting at the secrets
hidden within its walls.'

At times it becomes a little too descriptive, where it can be difficult to piece together what's important and what's not.

The implementation is solid along a critical path but sketchy off that path. A lot of unimportant scenery is left unimplemented, but conversation is indicated fairly well through the use of a topics menu and bolding.

I struggled a bit in some of the actions scenes of the game, although the final results made sense. I believe the very end of the game has some randomization.

Overall, this was fun to play, although it could implement some more things.

Edit: This game is also an adaptation of a Call of Cthulhu module, I believe.

I played this game on BlueStacks, an Android emulator.

This is a short game with a few options, each of which seems fairly strong. It uses a variety of Japanese words, often with explanations. There are several points where it seems like the game gives you freedom to make big choices; I didn't replay to verify.

It's hard to explain the story or to check the interactivity, because the game was really hard to understand. Usually a game is hard to understand because the author struggles with grammar or the story was written by AI and is bland, but this story seemed like it was written by someone with perfect English and unassisted by tools. It just is...weird. There's a lot of elaborate high language interspersed with random curse words. The language used is full of metaphors that didn't quite make sense to me. I think there was an experiment involving reviving someone in a relationship, but beyond that...I'm not sure.

An impressive amount accomplished in 4 hours, but it remains a mystery to me.